How to Blow Up a Planet

What happened to the future? When did we lose it, and what has taken its place? Political scientists have found a continual decline in visions of a shared transformative future since the early 1980s. Around the world, in party manifestos, inaugural speeches, and programmatic policy documents, principled statements about an open-ended future have given way to numerical targets like GDP growth achieved, emissions reduced, or people deported. The political right has been more interested in returning to an imaginary glorious past; consequently, the change has been most pronounced on the left, where the politics of an alternative liberatory future have ceded to the policies of technocratic governance and market discipline.

This story fits the interregnum of the 1990s and 2000s, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the slide of social democratic parties into neoliberalism. When Francis Fukuyama declared the “end of history,” he was looking ahead to a melancholy time when we would be “jaded by the experience of history.” The conflict over the best way to organize human society had ended, and liberal capitalist democracy would remain triumphant, but the future appeared to be an empty stretch, without passion, without struggle.

The financial crisis of 2008 did not recover the future so much as reveal that its absence was an ideological project. Writing in the aftermath of the crash, the radical cultural critic Mark Fisher diagnosed a phenomenon he called “capitalist realism,” meaning “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.” Elsewhere he wrote that the future had been “foreclosed,” and the metaphor was apt: we had been evicted from it, and now it belonged to the banks.

But nothing has depleted the future quite like climate change. As target after target has been passed and promise after promise broken, the time remaining to avert global catastrophe has been squandered. There is no noncatastrophic future left, and in fact it’s already here. How, in conditions of runaway climatic disaster, can the future be recovered? What visions of a shared transformative future are possible, and what happens to emancipatory politics, and to democracy itself, without them?

Abundance, by two American journalists, provides one answer. American liberals in positions of governance should commit to deregulation, which the authors believe will unleash the power of the market and of technology to provide cheap and plentiful housing, energy, and medicine. They define the “abundance” they seek as a “state in which there is enough of what we need to create lives better than what we have had,” and they believe it is “important to imagine a just—even a delightful—future and work backward to the technological advances that would hasten its arrival.”

Overshoot, by two Swedish academics, has a very different answer. The planet is already several years into the “overshoot conjuncture,” which they define as the time when “officially declared limits to global warming are exceeded—or in the process of being so—and the dominant classes responsible for the excess throw up their hands in resignation and accept that intolerable heat is coming.” The authors “attempt to gauge the power of the forces that destroy the conditions of life on Earth and that must be contended with in the coming years, if any such conditions are to be preserved.” They are not coy about their political project or what depends on it: there is “no path to a liveable planet that does not pass through the complete destruction of business as usual.”

Ezra Klein was one of the leading intellectual lights of Obama-era liberalism. Throughout his trajectory from early Internet blogs to The Washington Post’s “Wonkblog” to founding Vox to The New York Times and his own podcast, Klein has been the exemplar of a certain style of politics that has dominated the Democratic Party and its ancillary media for fifteen years. It is an urban, affluent, and educated political outlook, one that is conflict averse, self-consciously “smart,” and enthused about “complexity,” but with specific meanings for both of those words—where smart conveys a certainty of opinion and the speed of its expression, and complexity means a grasp of the arcane self-referential rules and vocabulary of policy and economics. It’s a style that can be glib and smug but also earnest and excited. Klein might be the most influential figure in liberal media at the moment, and he played a powerful part in advocating for the end of Joe Biden’s 2024 campaign. His coauthor, Derek Thompson, is a journalist at The Atlantic with a podcast, a Substack, and two previous books.

Abundance intends to set an agenda for a reconstituted liberalism, which Klein and Thompson think has gone astray. It is addressed to American liberals and especially to officials in states and cities governed by Democrats, and it covers policies the authors describe as being “within the zone of liberal concern,” such as climate change, health care inequality, affordable housing, and higher median wages. They describe their agenda as “a liberalism that builds,” one focused on production and increasing supply, not on consumption, and certainly not on redistribution. They believe that technology and invention are the most powerful forces for social change: “It is not just that the politics we have will affect the technologies we develop. The technologies we develop will shape the politics we come to have.”

The agenda also comes with a diagnosis of the problem. Starting in the 1970s many liberals (Ralph Nader is their main example) “acted across many different levels and branches of government…to slow the system down so the instances of abuse could be seen and stopped.” Although each reform may have been individually admirable or desirable, the accumulation of these blockages, regulations, and choke points undercut the capacity of the state to do much of anything, and now when it tries, it too often ends up trying to do everything at once. Klein and Thompson refer to this lamentable habit as “everything-bagel liberalism” and cite as an example the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act, which aimed to increase American manufacturing of semiconductors but which also involved questionnaires about environmental impacts and plans to include “women and other economically disadvantaged individuals” in the labor force, as well as to provide them with childcare facilities.

The result, they argue, is that

liberalism has become obsessed with procedure rather than with outcomes, that it seeks legitimacy through rule following rather than through the enactment of the public’s will…. Liberals have chosen to trust elected politicians and government workers less and trust regulatory and judicial processes more to ensure that government delivers.

The contents of the book are narrower than the introduction promises. The first three chapters are about regulation of the building industry, mostly in California, with a detour into electricity and transit regulation in chapter 2. The fourth chapter is an extended critique of the grant approval systems of the National Institutes of Health, and the fifth chapter attempts to show how government can help bring inventions to mass markets, with the Covid-19 vaccine serving as the prime example. The conclusion sketches a potted history of past transitions between “political orders”—from the New Deal to neoliberalism to the instability of the present.

The evidentiary core of each chapter consists of a summary of the academic work of a few experts, usually economists, with frequent and lengthy quotations, as well as the occasional interview, whose conclusions are repeated uncritically. (To take one example, they quote without scrutiny the claim of Zoom CEO Eric Yuan that he is requiring employees to work in person in order to foster trust, rather than to impose discipline or to recoup the costs of commercial real estate.) They give no sense of the unruly literatures on their subjects, the ranges of disagreement, the difficult problems and mutually exclusive solutions. They claim to set an agenda for a new liberal political order, but what they have done is read some economists and argue, again, for deregulation.

Andreas Malm is a professor of human ecology at Lund University, in Sweden, and he has emerged as one of the most strident voices in climate politics. Klein’s previous book is called Why We’re Polarized; Malm wrote a book called How to Blow Up a Pipeline. Malm’s coauthor, Wim Carton, is a researcher in human geography and sustainable development, also at Lund. Malm has written several blistering manifestos, as well as academic work about the Anthropocene and the Industrial Revolution.

Overshoot breaks neatly into two thematic portions. The first is a bleak climate history of 2020–2023. Already by 2021

the world had seen at least 1.1°C of global warming, six IPCC reports, twenty-six COPs and immeasurable suffering for the most affected people and areas, and yet it generated the largest surge in absolute emissions—the input that directly determines the rate of warming—in recorded history.

They anatomize the world-record profits of the five big oil companies, the immense investment (over $5 trillion, they estimate) by banks in fossil fuel projects, and the ongoing global construction of pipelines and gas terminals. Despite all the disasters, all the models, and all the conferences, in 2022 there were at least 119 oil pipelines in development around the world, plus 447 gas pipelines, 300 gas terminals, 432 new coal mines, and 485 new coal power plants. As the historian of science Jean-Baptiste Fressoz showed in his recent book More and More and More, despite the vast quantities of talk and money invested in producing a technological “energy transition,” last year the world burned more coal and more wood than ever before.

Malm and Carton use overshoot to mean both a time period and a political concept. The basic problem is that reducing emissions on a scale and at a speed that could keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius would require companies to lose billions of dollars in already-made fixed capital investments—those pipelines, mines, machinery, and decades of research. Having recognized that there wasn’t going to be any meaningful mitigation of carbon emissions and that all climate targets were unreachable, the group that Malm and Carton call “the dominant classes” began to argue that it was actually permissible to overshoot the targets because it would be easier in the future to do a lot of mitigation very quickly, thanks to inevitable technological progress and economic growth.

This idea has worked as a kind of Freudian repression, a politics of infinite deferral: mitigation has obviously proved inadequate, so only a full-scale revolution is now feasible. But revolution is impossible to countenance, so the problem must be solved by the markets and technologies of the future. Malm and Carton call this faith an elite psychopathology, “not merely moral madness: it [is] madness without qualifier; madness in the original, clinical sense of the term.” Later they quote from a 2020 report by JP Morgan economists, which candidly observes: “We cannot rule out catastrophic outcomes where human life as we know it is threatened…. The earth is on an unsustainable trajectory. Something will have to change at some point if the human race is going to survive.” JP Morgan is the top funder of fossil fuel industries in the world.

The second section of Overshoot outlines the difficulty of rapid decarbonization. Malm and Carton consider and dismantle the optimism of carbon capture and geoengineering, and they pile up evidence for the extraordinary financial investment since 2020 in what they call “fossil capital.” Any meaningful energy transition would make those immense pools of capital worthless—oil that can’t be pumped, pipelines that can’t be used, power plants that must go cold. Even minimal demands for decarbonization could call the sanctity of fossil capital into question and trigger an investor rush for the exits. Malm and Carton demand that we not minimize the kind of economic dislocation that might follow, and thus the kind of opposition such a project would face.

Totally halting fossil fuel use would entail the destruction (or stranding, meaning to render unusable and unsellable) of upward of $13 trillion in capital assets. Fossil fuel companies, in turn, are inextricable from the financial institutions that fund them, so that capital stranding would also mean a generalized financial crisis and the collapse of tax revenues for governments around the world, to which could be added job losses, evaporated pensions, and so on. “The apocalyptic magnitude of climate breakdown,” they write, “is mirrored by the apocalyptic magnitude of capitalist collapse, if any constraint is ever put on the former. But no such collapse will be induced without politics.”

There is no sign of a political appetite for such a collapse, and it is difficult to imagine a political party winning an election on the promise of causing one. Instead the politics of climate change has run in the opposite direction: more drilling, more burning, more energy, more production—and people, not assets, are stranded.

The mood of Abundance is that of a chirpy regional sales manager giving a PowerPoint; Overshoot’s is a wild-eyed buccaneer swinging onto a burning frigate with a cutlass in his teeth. Klein and Thompson blame liberals and liberalism for the decline of an abundant future; Malm and Carton blame fossil capital for planetary destruction, and they do not hesitate to analogize oil executives to Nazis, slave owners, serial murderers, and arsonists. Klein and Thompson believe that we live in a post-material political world, one constituted by ideas, narratives, and verbal persuasion, where “policy is downstream of values” and “political movements succeed when they build a vision of the future that is imbued with the virtues of the past.” Malm and Carton believe we live in a world ruled by the profit imperatives of capital.

But for all their differences, both books are concerned about how to constitute a politics in the face of climate change, and both agree that the technological possibility of radical transformation already exists but is held back by politics. Abundance opens with an image of 2050, with artificial chicken and beef grown in cellular meat facilities powered by geothermal wells and nuclear plants. Overshoot can imagine a world where sheep happily doze under agrivoltaics (solar panels integrated with cropland), forests are interleaved with silvovoltaic trees (vertical solar collectors that leave timber undisturbed), and photovoltaic panels float in flooded lignite mines. These things are possible, so who has chosen not to use them? Klein and Thompson worry that liberals use environmental regulations to block climate change mitigation projects, and they prefer the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency: it “works because it empowers program managers to pursue their most radical ideas with an open-ended budget and vast connections throughout science and industry.”

Both books also have theories of political change. Abundance closes by quoting the historian Gary Gerstle to the effect that the creation of a new historical era requires (in this order) deep-pocketed donors, think tanks and policy networks, a political party that can reliably win elections, the ability to shape political opinion everywhere from the Supreme Court to broadcast media, and a persuasive moral perspective. By that measure, their project has met with immediate success. Members of the House have launched a bipartisan congressional Build America Caucus. Open Philanthropy set up a $120 million “Abundance and Growth Fund.” Reforms consistent with the abundance agenda have been made in other quarters: the Supreme Court has limited the scope of environmental review, the California Environmental Quality Act has been substantially rolled back, and at least 1,200 National Institutes of Health employees have lost their jobs. Abundance has generated debate, denunciation, and conversation across almost all major publications, but so far those forming a new political order have been the Republicans. Nevertheless, Abundance has been understood as the rallying cry of one side of a civil war for the future of the Democratic Party.

Overshoot, by contrast, argues that “any attempt at meaningful mitigation of the crisis would have to waylay the dominant classes with a force and confrontational resolve unlike anything in the common memory or imagination.” The authors envision a range of possible interventions that could rapidly provoke a fire sale of disinvestment from fossil capital: governments could remove subsidies, restrict exports, close state-owned land, revoke permits, cut off credit, or outright seize assets. Malm and Carton do not think these things likely, only possible, but also necessary. “As things now stand,” they write, “the crisis will not wait for anything less than a blitz to strip elites of the assets they hold and defend.”

Overshoot is written in an academic idiom drawing freely from Marx and Freud but with none of the cautiously hedged claims that can characterize academic writing. The book’s commitment to using political power to destroy elite property is not likely to gather much philanthropic funding. Readers of Abundance will probably find Malm and Carton’s rhetoric too florid, their diagnosis and their prescription too unrealistic. But the point of Overshoot is exactly that a small group of people making billions of dollars by building oil pipelines while hundreds of Pakistani villages are washed away and Los Angeles burns is hardly a realistic way to organize society. For Malm and Carton, it is impossible to take the scientific consensus on climate change seriously and still reject revolutionary transformations of economic and political life.

Overshoot concludes with the observation that private jet sales and use hit new records in 2021 and 2022. We could add superyacht sales, which seemed to have peaked in 2023, but the Edmiston superyacht brokers report a record-setting first quarter of 2025. Some things are already abundant.

The political function of the abundance agenda is straightforward: with its preference for friendliness to corporations, market solutions, and technologically driven growth over redistribution, it is the only coherent alternative to the Bernie Sanders/Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez left. By losing to Donald Trump a second time—after the felony convictions, after the January 6 insurrection, after everything—and losing so comprehensively, the Democratic Party stands revealed as one of the most incompetent, rudderless, and barren political forces in modern history. For decades Democrats have had no vision to offer beyond gentler versions of Republican policies: the same commitment to market-based social policy at home and militarism abroad. From higher education to health care to retirement policy, they have had no ideas to match the relentless Republican drive to privatization, and nothing to rival the terrifyingly comprehensive creativity of the Project 2025 agenda.

Barack Obama offered a vision of hope and change in 2008, a moment he hoped future generations would look back on as the time when “we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” Instead his administration presided over continually widening inequality, the destruction of about 30 percent of Black home equity, a fossil fuel boom, a steady increase in health care costs, sweeping domestic surveillance, extrajudicial drone murders, and seeming impunity for the architects of the Iraq War and the 2008 crisis. If you promise hope and change and fail to deliver, there is no way to recover from the consequent sense of popular betrayal, and no way to credibly promise change again. Since 2016 the Democratic Party has consisted of two things: the Sanders left and efforts to defeat it. Abundance is the latest effort, a closed parenthesis in the halfhearted sentence of contemporary liberalism.

The hollowness of Abundance, and its incommensurability with the present crisis of American democracy, is immediately apparent. In their opening sketch of the abundant future, Klein and Thompson write:

Thanks to higher productivity from AI, most people can complete what used to be a full week of work in a few days, which has expanded the number of holidays, long weekends, and vacations. Less work has not meant less pay. AI is built on the collective knowledge of humanity, and so its profits are shared.

Setting aside the problem that there is no sign of an increase in aggregate productivity from the stochastic parrot inaccurately called “AI,” and the bigger problem that higher productivity in no way translates to shorter workweeks for laborers instead of higher profits for owners, that last sentence refutes the entire book. Klein and Thompson are opposed to redistribution, which they refer to as “parceling out the present” and which they claim is “not enough,” and instead of imagining “social insurance programs,” they propose that we make “technological advances.” Here they are consistent with Obama and with Ronald Reagan before him. In The Audacity of Hope, Obama wrote that “Reagan’s central insight—that the liberal welfare state had grown complacent and overly bureaucratic, with Democratic policy makers more obsessed with slicing the economic pie than with growing the pie—contained a good deal of truth.” Abundance has little to add to that statement beyond technological enthusiasm.

Klein and Thompson do not seem to realize that their proposals would also entail large-scale redistribution and that the ills they seek to cure are the result of inequality rather than regulation, because they do not seem to understand how prices and property work in capitalism. Translating higher profits to shorter workweeks would require a scale of redistribution that far outstrips anything Bernie Sanders has proposed. Claiming that profits will be shared because they are based on “the collective knowledge of humanity” opens up a wider set of imperatives than they realize. Most profit, labor, and technology is in some way built on the collective knowledge of humanity, in the sense that education, work, and knowledge are shared, social, and cumulative, and all workers are the result of collective social reproduction.

Or take their real concern, which is housing. They devote no serious thought to the basic political problem that homeowners are a large and powerful constituency, especially at the local level, who are likely to oppose (or already do oppose) the reforms Klein and Thompson suggest because driving down the cost of housing will drive down the value of homes. That constituency has produced undeniably regressive politics—which is a political fact to be reckoned with. So must the fact that homeowners organize to protect their asset prices because decades of American policy have used mortgages to substitute for the welfare state and wage growth. Any plausible agenda to drive down the cost of housing is going to require things like social housing, rent controls, and some mechanism to keep Blackstone and other private equity giants from buying up all the new housing and holding it empty until prices rise. Housing abundance calls for redistribution, in other words, as well as an aggressive state willing to confront property owners ranging from homeowner coalitions to asset managers.

Klein and Thompson likewise seem unaware that technologies are owned by people. Despite an entire chapter on the problems of scaling technologies to mass consumption, they do not pause to consider that the self-driving cars, the lab-grown meat, and the solar electricity of their imagined future will be property, whose owners will have an interest in higher profits, higher rents, and higher prices. Klein and Thompson’s agenda is predicated on avoiding distributional conflicts by increasing supply so as to lower prices, yet they do not address the problem that lower prices are good for buyers but bad for sellers, and therefore are themselves a kind of distributional conflict, though one mediated through markets instead of politics. Their faith in markets is axiomatic. In passing, they describe “modern liberal politics” as an effort to “make universal” a set of “products and services.” Not justice, equality, dignity, or freedom, but products and services. This is the vision of the future that has attracted millions of dollars to remake the Democratic Party.

In Overshoot, Malm and Carton describe a burning world ruled by a mad death cult, a world that can be rescued and remade only through an urgent catastrophe. It is a bold vision without a political constituency. Abundance has political influence, but it is not a fighting manifesto, or a plan to build an organized, participatory mass party, and its vision is reheated forty-year-old deregulation mixed with Internet YIMBYism.

In a recent essay the political scientist Jonathan White argued that visions of the future serve three political purposes: they provide a critical perspective on the present; they help form a collective political agent by providing the shared goals that bring lots of individuals into an organized group; and they present a source of commitment, especially during the “transition trough” when projects for social change entail short-term disruption.^* Beyond those functions, the future has a specific importance for democratic legitimacy: democracy can survive flaws and failures so long as it seems to be an ongoing process, and people in it can view their hardships as temporary. Losing elections is the classic example: knowing that you might win the next one encourages you to consent to the democratic process. White calls this “anticipatory legitimacy.”

The collapse of that future-oriented legitimacy is at the heart of the crisis of American political life. Republicans’ contestation of elections and their willingness to threaten the lives and jobs of their opponents, ranging from condoning open insurrection on January 6 to firing career civil servants who refuse to break the law, have imperiled the certainty that democracy will be ongoing. Climate change also casts doubt on the prospect of later rectifying present hardships. The sense that the world cannot be radically different—Fisher’s “capitalist realism”—likewise has restricted the belief that our current predicaments are temporary. By focusing on policies instead of politics, Abundance does not call into question the basic inequalities of the world around us or recognize the power of contending forces. Fukuyama himself recently took to the Financial Times to approve of Klein and Thompson, in case there was any doubt that the abundance agenda is compatible with the end of history. Overshoot argues that it’s already too late to avert disaster, and the economic dislocation that Malm and Carton think is necessary must also be irrevocable, fundamentally separating the future from the present.

In very different ways, Abundance and Overshoot are trying to form collective political agents—donor-pleasing deregulatory liberal politicians for the former, radical climate revolutionaries for the latter. But can either future begin, given the limitations of the present? What kind of politics allows for the shift from thinking to action, from predicting the future to creating it?

These questions can partly be answered through attention to how each book marshals and uses the past. History is littered with what the German theorist Reinhart Koselleck called “superseded futures,” once thought likely but later defeated or abandoned. Overshoot is full of lost futures: thresholds passed, warnings ignored, moments when change would have been easier and cheaper. Klein and Thompson do not cite but bring to mind John Maynard Keynes’s 1930 essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” which also imagined a future of abundance and shorter workweeks. Keynes predicted future GDP almost perfectly, but he thought economic growth would be widely shared, and his future included a solution to technological unemployment as well as the end of the accumulation of wealth as a source of social importance. Klein and Thompson do not consider why this future was superseded, and now, ninety-five years later, they set out to imagine it again, believing the past is a long trajectory of technological progress temporarily held back by regulation and social protections enacted by procedural liberals. For them, the relation of the past to the future is part of a story of overcoming, not a tragedy of lost possibilities.

They are right that much of the blame for our current predicaments can be traced to the forms of liberal governance since the 1970s, but they are mistaken to blame, more specifically, its predilection for environmental regulation and building codes. Rather, it is the way liberal politicians have either acquiesced to or actively encouraged the rise of an unaccountable tech and finance oligarchy that now threatens the continued existence of democracy itself and that claims a monopoly on the capacity to imagine and create the future. Malm and Carton are right that, for a better future to begin, the oligarchy needs to be met with a confrontational politics of a scale and persistence unknown to our political present. But the future is one thing the oligarchy does not yet own.